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Double exposure: uses ofphotography in Ted Hughes'sBirthday LettersTobias Döring aa LMU MunichPublished online: 10 Nov 2008.

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Tobias Doring

Double exposure: uses of photography in Ted Hughes’sBirthday Letters

I

Since their rise to cultural prominence in the nineteenth century, photo-graphs have been regarded in close association with functions of familylife, memory and mourning. Many studies bear this out. MarianneHirsch, for instance, opens her monograph on photography, narrativeand postmemory with personal comments on some missing pictures ofher grandmother which seem to have ‘stayed with’ her ‘as pointed signifiersof loss’ and which, in ‘some strange way’, have even prompted her to writethis book ‘in response’ to their disappearance.1 In the same way RolandBarthes tells us in La chambre claire, his oft-cited reflections on photogra-phy, how one November evening after his mother’s death he sat down tosort out some family photographs.2 Looking through the pictures that wereleft of her, Barthes says, was an attempt to seek some consolation but hesoon felt it would not work. While pondering the photographic portraitshe found, the mourning son was barely able to recognize in them theface of the deceased they were supposed to show. This is what he callsone of the most terrible aspects of mourning: instead of helping thebereaved to summon up remembrance of things past, pictures of thedead first raise and yet must disappoint the hope to restore loss andrelieve sorrows. Far from offering any comfort or quiet recollection, hismother’s photographs seemed meaningless and empty to him; as Barthesputs it, these images would no more ‘speak’.3

But then he goes on to report the extraordinary revelation, which hassince concerned many commentators trying to grasp the elusive power ofthis strangely epiphanic moment and which has also moved Hirsch ‘toreturn’ to Barthes’s book as a starting point for her own critical explora-tions.4 As he was browsing through the stacks of family pictures, hechanced upon one that stood out from the rest.5 It shows his mother as afive year old girl, carefully placed in the winter garden of her childhood

Textual Practice 22(4), 2008, 679–704

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis

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DOI: 10.1080/09502360802457442

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home, awkwardly posing among palm trees with her brother in front of thephotographer’s lens. And yet this picture offers what he was seeking and hadnot found before. Despite its stiff and staged arrangement by the combinedforces of the professional studio and the bourgeois household, the wintergarden photograph succeeds in presenting – or rather: presencing – tohim his late mother with overpowering clarity, in what he recognizes asher true bearing and being. It captures, as Jay Prosser emphatically putsit,6 ‘the space of love’ they used to share while ‘poignantly suspendingwhat the text says’, i.e. the power of this image for him goes beyondwords. The work of an anonymous nineteenth-century photographer,eight decades later, thus comes to assist the son in mourning.

In fact, for Barthes this ‘image juste’7 provides a double revelation: itconsummates both his quest for memory traces to overcome the pains ofbereavement and his quest for the essence of photography which he setout to search. As we follow his meandering narrative through Lachambre claire, we realize that the discovery of his mother’s wintergarden picture was such an epiphanic moment because it manifests theelusive character of photographs, their special quality by which they aredistinguished among the wider family of visual works. In cultural theoryand criticism, photography was long treated as a step-child, Barthesobserved when he began his own research8 in order to restore this neglectedoffspring of the industrial revolution to its proper cultural place. And it isonly late in his career that he is now prepared to formulate his famousnotion of the photographic punctum,9 evidently fostered, as Hirschsuggests,10 by the ‘sense of mutual recognition’ and the familial ‘exchangeof looks’ between the mother as a little girl, her parents and, posthumously,her son. Given the overbearing significance that this photo holds forBarthes’s entire project, however, it has always felt to be highly remarkable– indeed disturbing – that we never see the picture. His book contains noless than twenty-five illustrations, which are duly noted, read, questionedand discussed in detail. But the revelatory, most prominent and powerfulpicture on whose effect the central critical claims rest is not included.Perhaps this is, according to Clive Scott,11 because its traumatic qualityfor the filial beholder cannot be reproduced for any one else seeing it invery different circumstances; or because, as Michel Fried has argued,12

its structural unreproducibility serves to strengthen what he identifies asthe ‘antitheatrical animus’ of Barthes’s argument, rejecting the ‘exhibi-tion-value’ (Benjamin’s term) of the photographic; or perhaps, as hasbeen speculated with some force,13 the much-debated winter gardenphotograph may be wholly imaginary, not taken with a camera buttotally produced in words.

Whatever the true case may be, the picture’s lack is surely compen-sated for by verbal means. And it is this predicament – of a visual

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document which gives evidence of a real presence yet which itself is onlyevidenced through verbal representation so that its own existence is trans-formed and can even be called into doubt – that interests me for thepurpose of this paper and that provides, I want to argue, a particularlyuseful perspective when reading Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters. Insteadof showing us the image that speaks to him so eloquently, Barthes nowspeaks for it, substituting words for looks and representing for us whatcannot represent itself. The same, arguably, happens in lines such as thefollowing:

First sight. First snapshot isolatedUnalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.[. . .]I see you there, clearer, more realThan in any of the years in its shadow –As if I saw you that once, then never again.14

These lines, too, speak of an epiphanic and elusive moment and they speakfor a photograph which offers not simply remembrance of things past but,in some strange way, seems to capture the real presence of what has beenlost. As readers of Hughes’s Birthday Letters we are indeed aware thatthey address a dead person. Their dialogic gestures are postmortems andthe apostrophes speak of bereavement as they reach out towards a wifedeceased. The lines are quoted from ‘St Botolph’s’, the seventh poem inthe sequence, which retells what happened on the famous evening inFebruary 1956 – a set piece in all biographies – when Hughes and Plathfirst met in Cambridge at a literary party. Or rather, the poem narrateshow Hughes, who figures as the self-confessed poetic speaker, years latercontemplates the images and stories left to him about that fatefulmeeting now mediated through photography. ‘What photographs do’, ithas plausibly been claimed,15 ‘is to bring the past into the present, confront-ing us with the passage of time and the stillness of that which has gone’; yetsuch a general statement can only partly describe what happens in the poemwhere the movements between past and present, time and stillness, presenceand absence are rather intricate and puzzling. Curiously, the ‘sight’ pro-vided by this particular photograph is said to be ‘clearer’ and ‘more real’than other and more recent sights of Sylvia all feared to have fallen undersome ominous ‘shadow’; it seems as if the notion of unshadowed, pureand pristine experience championed in the poem’s rhetoric of ‘first-ness’is somehow predicated on the photographic nature of this personalmemory – although its emphasis on technical production and fixation,on the other hand, could rather be expected to render it impersonal: a snap-shot for the public gaze. Still, we note that ‘the camera’s glare’ is celebrated

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here for having ‘stilled’ a fleeting and a precious moment not otherwiseaccessible. Needless to say, we must further note that, to us, this powerfullyrevealing photograph is not accessible. Birthday Letters contains no illus-trations and yet we should see it, I would like to argue in this paper, as aphoto-album – albeit without the pictures.

The poems in this book work by – indeed work with – central uses ofphotography rendered in and through the medium of a poet’s languagewho constructs controlling tropes from camera work and so tries tobespeak the loss at once described and displaced here. For long, thecamera’s ‘detailed representation of material facts’, Jennifer Green-Lewisexplains,16 has suggested it to be a technology ‘through which nothingwould be lost’, and yet loss always is ‘a necessary part of rememberingitself’. This seems to be a reason, she goes on, for Barthes to identify‘the tension generated in every photograph between what was, and is,the case’. But in the case of Birthday Letters, this tension doubles orincreases because the verbal interventions, i.e. the letters of the alphabet,take over the part of remembering here while, at the same time, taking iton. In this way they form photographic poems or, in W.J.T. Mitchell’sterm, ‘imagetexts’17 whose function we should carefully consider. Allsuch effects, however, can only be registered or reconstructed by thetraces they leave in Hughes’s text because, like in the case of Barthes’smomentous winter garden photograph revealing all about his mother, allwe have of them is just the writer’s word.

Trying to work through the intricacies of these visual–verbal inter-relations, I would like to explore the performances of mourning in theelegiac moves enacted by Hughes’s poems as they attempt to recuperate,or restage, certain memories of Plath. In autumn 1998, nine monthsafter publication, Hughes wrote in a much-publicized letter that BirthdayLetters ‘is a gathering of the occasions on which I tried to open a direct,private, inner contact with my first wife – not thinking to make apoem, thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself, and to feel herthere listening’.18 In partial agreement and partial opposition to this self-description, my reading sets out to discuss why Hughes’s imagined‘direct’ contact should, in fact, be mediated by the camera image and his‘private’ evocation of the dead proceed by means of ekphrasis. BirthdayLetters, I argue, operates on a photographic trope; whatever acts of grief,commemoration, conversation and, arguably, self-memorialization are per-formed in these poems, such acts are framed, formed, prompted or directedby the power of photography, sometimes openly acknowledged as in thefew lines quoted from ‘St Botolph’s’, sometimes covertly at work, butalways crucially triangulating Hughes’s elegiac language.

How can we account for this? What does it reveal about the work ofmourning? And what may be its consequences for our understanding of the

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role and place of photographic images in the cultural negotiations at aspecific time? In trying to pursue these questions, I hope to suggest thatthe verbalized photographs in Birthday Letters function in ambivalentways: as double takes which expose the present to the past and the pastto the present they are not simply mimetic or mnemonic devices butoften work as ‘composite pictures’, superimposing and condensingseveral images, in the same way Freud described the key process of dream-work. Moreover, their poetic function is also always political because theact of ‘giving (male) voice’ to a ‘silent (female) picture’ involves therivalry of representation in the long-standing verbal–visual paragone justas much as in the long-standing Hughes–Plath controversy over the bio-graphical record. Who owns the right over a picture, the subject who isphotographed or the photographer who takes it? This legal question,raised by Barthes,19 sums up what power issues are at stake in memoryand mourning, too.

II

Few poetry books become bestsellers, but then even fewer poetry booksmake front-page news on publication and occasion so many reviews,counter-reviews, letters-to-the-editor and other publicized responses onboth sides of the Atlantic as Birthday Letters did when it appeared tenyears ago, only months before the poet’s death. The publicity and popular-ity of the volume were surely based on reasons which had little, or nothing,to do with the actual poems but with the potentially scandal-mongeringrevelations they were thought to offer. Here, quite unexpectedly, a poetlong known for ‘his refusal to enter the world of historical humanaffairs’,20 seemed to do just that and, at long last, publish his version ofthe circumstances and the catastrophic ending of a much debated marriage.His final book’s success was largely due, therefore, to what has aptly beendescribed its ‘Oprah Winfrey element’.21

There are points where these kind of expectations are indeed raised inthe text. For example the concluding phrase of a poem early in thesequence ‘Your story. My story’22 apparently suggests that here, eventually,the record is set straight and the full story told. Rather than relying on thesepoints, however, and considering, in Leslie Cahoon’s words,23 the ‘ques-tion of truth’, we should immediately note that in actual fact all such expec-tations are frustrated. Not only is no news forthcoming – as SarahChurchwell rightly says,24 whatever story Birthday Letters tells or retellsis overbearingly familiar; but the very notion of historical recording, ofgiving evidence and bearing witness is called into doubt. Significantly,this is a notion strongly associated with photography. No matter how

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often we remind ourselves that photographs – even before digitalisation –are always a matter also of design, determination and, to some extent, con-struction, ‘the cultural fact remains’, as Scott explains,25 ‘that photographsare believed to have evidential force and the ability to authenticate realevents’, a common cultural belief that the uses of photography in BirthdayLetters both confirm and question. At least for the first one and a half cen-turies of its social career, the photograph has been invested with the auth-ority of factual documentation – what Susan Sontag calls ‘the presumptionof veracity’26 – which is why these technically produced and reproducibleimages have quickly become central elements of newspapers. It is evenmore significant, then, that Birthday Letters opens with the poeticpersona describing how he came across a news-stand in central London dis-playing photographs of recently arrived American students in Cambridge:

Where was it, in the Strand? A displayOf news items, in photographs.For some reason I noticed it.A picture of that year’s intakeOf Fulbright Scholars.27

Even before their first real encounter at the Cambridge party, the veryfirst – though one-sided and virtual – contact between Hughes andPlath, as here remembered, is not just mediated by a photograph but infact occasioned by its status as a published image and public recordcirculating in the networks of media, commerce and the news industry.

Precisely because the later conundrums of the Hughes–Plath mar-riage, too, have for several decades circulated in these same networks, wemust emphasize the cautionary note that the opening poem strikes.While acknowledging this photograph’s potential documentary power,the text rather questions its actual effects: the mode is interrogative andthe mood sceptical. ‘Were you among them?’ the poet asks, trying to visu-alize ‘Your exaggerated American/ Grin for the cameras’, but eventuallyadmitting: ‘Then I forgot. Yet I remember/ The picture’.28 This interplayof remembrance and forgetting, vision and re-vision, calling to memoryand recalling from it, I think, is crucial – and fatal for the presumedproject of historical recording. The poet remembers the fact of thepicture but he forgets what it factually pictured. As Churchwell writes,29

the poem ‘responds not to a first memory of Plath but to a retroactivelyimagined, publicly mediated representation of what might have beenher’. Thus, the biographical reading that founds itself on photographicevidence must founder even as it has begun.

The prime example of this particular approach to Birthday Letters isErica Wagner’s book-length commentary Ariel’s Gift, a well-informed

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and no doubt informative study of the historian’s bait laid out by it, fullyillustrated and substantiated with sixteen photographs from the Hughesarchive.30 I do not wish to dispute the possibility of such readings butrather question the underlying assumptions about photographic verite onwhich they rest; more importantly, I also would like to point out thatthese assumptions are already being questioned with the uses of the photo-graphic trope in the poems themselves.

Biographical readings apart, there have been two other criticalapproaches to Hughes’s last book: an intertextual approach tracing andretracing the lines of allusion, citation, revisitation and rewriting whichbind Birthday Letters to many published texts – and perhaps some unpub-lished ones – of Plath’s literary output; or a mythopoetic approach inter-preting the text mainly in terms of the Ovidian figures – or evenCabbalistic notions31 – it employs. Uses of Ovid are especially interesting,not least because Hughes’s previous book, the prize-winning collectionTales from Ovid 32 (1997), seems to give a crucial clue. Anne Whitehead,33

Lynda Bundtzen and Leslie Cahoon have therefore read the poet-personain Birthday Letters as an Orpheus-figure mourning for his lost Eurydice andventuring into the underworld in his attempt to re-establish contact (inter-estingly, the Orpheus-myth was not included in Tales from Ovid, as ifHughes was saving his retelling for a supplementary volume a year later).Whatever merits and critical insights these two approaches clearly have,my own response is to insist, again, that some of the key points in thetext they rest on are in fact photographic tropes and imagetexts, i.e. clearreminders of the specific verbal–visual figuration of the intertextual andmythological traces, not previously noted or discussed.

Hughes’s poem ‘St Botolph’s’, for instance, just quoted for its celebra-tion of photography, happens to reflect one of Plath’s early poems actuallywritten at the time of their first meeting in 1956 which begins ‘The photo-graphic chamber of the eye’34 and thus also probes into the power ofmemory with a photographic trope. Surely therefore, there is much welearn from intertextual readings of Birthday Letters because of the frequentand obsessive echoes or interferences in Hughes’s poetic language fromPlath’s previously printed voices. But the prime example that Hughes’stext recalls and partly repeats, Plath’s ‘Daddy’-poem – easily the mostfamous and controversial poem she ever wrote – is in fact written in theface of an actual photograph, just as the two poems by Hughes whichrespond to it, ‘Black Coat’ and ‘A Picture of Otto’, are framed andfraught by photographic language. ‘You stand at the blackboard, daddy,/In the picture I have of you’, we read in Plath;35 ‘You stand there at theblackboard: Lutheran/ Minister manque’,36 we read in Hughes. Theverbal echo, then, is at the same time the reflection of a shared visual actbecause the apostrophe in each case is directed not to the father or

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father-in-law nor to some general memory of him but to a specific, ident-ifiable representation: his photograph. In this way, central lines of textualmirroring between Plath and Hughes are refracted through the cameraimages they both evoke; here, the picture of Otto Plath becomes a rep-resentational site on which their different views and glances meet andwhich they, each in turn, represent in ekphrastic language. What,however, is its function? And how does the camera work relate to thespecial uses that the poems make of it? I shall presently return to thesepoints to argue that the key interpretive figure for his married life thatHughes constructs in Birthday Letters and demonstrates with thispicture-poem is modelled on a photographic technique: double exposure.

At this point, a brief comment on the Ovidian, especially Orphean,readings and their unacknowledged interrelations with the poetic uses ofphotography. What she calls ‘freeze frames’ or ‘snapshots arrestingmotion’ throughout the early poems of the volume remind LyndaBundtzen ‘of Orpheus’ final, impulsive gaze at Eurydice’;37 but she doesnot consider how, or why, the prime reference she identifies to Hughes-Orpheus’ descent into the ‘underworld’38 is precisely situated in thepoetic contemplation and ekphrastic description of Otto’s photograph,which I just mentioned. We could go further therefore and rememberHirsch’s analysis of the ‘family frame’ through mourning and photographywhere she argues, following Klaus Theweleit, that Orpheus’ descent intoand re-emergence from Hades can be regarded as figuring ‘a masculineprocess’ of creation ‘facilitated by the encounter with the beautiful deadwoman’, hence as ‘an artificial ‘birth’ produced by men: by malecouples’ trying to ‘bypass the generativity of women’.39 Barthes, too,characterized the photographer as an Orphean revenant, a figure walkingin Orpheus’ footsteps, emulating the mythic poet’s way and place ofvision without turning around.40 This may indeed prompt us to readHughes’s text in terms of its Orphean figures but not without ignoring,as has previously been the case, the photographic figures by which it pro-ceeds. The descent into and re-emergence from the underworld of personalhistory and memory that Hughes’s poet-persona performs are facilitatednot only by the encounter with his beautiful dead wife but, I argue, withspecific photographic traces left of her and her father and now renderedin his words. It is the prevalence and presence of photography in BirthdayLetters, combining intertextual, intermedial and mythological approachesin these imagetexts, that we need to acknowledge and interpret.

La chambre claire, incidentally, plays on another Ovidian myth, thestory of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, which also figures promi-nently in Birthday Letters. All the world’s photographs form a vast labyr-inth, Barthes says,41 through which only the one (and unrepresented)winter garden picture of his mother managed to give him guidance, like

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Ariadne’s thread, and helped him find his bearings. Hughes’s poem ‘TheMinotaur’42 is less hopeful, but with its painfully vivid rendering of aviolent moment in their marriage – another of those set pieces in Plathbiographies – it may suggest the same idea that Barthes gained from hisAriadne:43 that one should address photographs essentially in the romanticterms of love and death. At any rate, the figure of the Minotaur, double-beast and product of a monstrous union, eventually emerges as a figureof the double exposure that is central in Hughes’s labyrinth of letters.

III

In her study of the various biographical afterlives of Sylvia Plath, The SilentWoman,44 Janet Malcolm makes a canny observation: all the familiar,actual photographs of Sylvia Plath look devastatingly banal, ridiculousand disappointing. The great poet features in them ‘as a vacuous girl ofthe fifties, with dark lipstick and blond hair’,45 a perfect image of theAmerican college girl or house wife, evoking ‘soap and deodorant advertise-ments’46 rather than the ‘queen, priestess, magician’s girl, [. . .] earthmother, moon goddess’47 or however readers may imagine her personafrom the Ariel poems. The discrepancy perhaps relates to the contemporaryconventions in posing for the camera, but Malcolm’s observation I thinkalso shows a basic problem in readers’ hypothetical constructions of a‘look’ or ‘face’ to visually imagine the first person pronoun ‘I’ of thepoems they are reading. The reverse problem seems to hold in a historio-graphic genre like biography, where readers are actively encouraged to con-struct a clear and visually rendered image of the persona referred to withthe third person pronoun. This is what Malcolm suggests when sheargues that the problem of biography is how to write about people ‘whoare discovered frozen in certain unnatural or unpleasant attitudes, like char-acters in tableaux vivants or people in snapshots with their mouths open’.48

Her photographic simile here describes the discontinuity and somewhatrandom nature of biographical evidence around which, nevertheless, a nar-rative is plotted. Thus giving voice and word, hence meaning and coher-ence, to a series of silent pictures the biographer stands in the superiorposition of a writer whose medium unfolds in time – the same positionthat has been identified in the traditional hierarchy of gender and genreunderyling the visual–verbal argument in central reference texts likeLessing’s Laokoon.49 In this way, the genre of biography is predicated onthe conventional gender-difference by which, according to Mitchell,words have traditionally been credited with ‘masculine’ power andcontrol over the ‘feminine’ silent image that is in need of verbal interpret-ation. With regard to imagetexts, however, the cultural dynamics may well

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be more complex. ‘However powerful language is in determining thepowerplay of the photograph’, Clive Scott argues in The Spoken Image,50

‘the photograph is artful in its evasions and slippages’ and comes to con-front language as ‘the never completely assimilated, the uncontrollable’.In just this sense, the trope of female silence might also signify a positionof resistance, as indeed Malcolm’s term of Plath as ‘silent woman’ means tosuggest, emphasizing her ‘(Medusan) speechlessness that is the deadly,punishing weapon’.51

This interplay of power and gender positions in verbal–visual inter-relations should be kept in mind when, prompted by Malcolm’s simileof the photographic archive, we now look more closely at BirthdayLetters. So far, some isolated examples of lines or passages in which photo-graphs are verbally featured have been noted. But in fact the presence ofphotography is productive throughout the entire volume. Referencesabound: ‘stopped, as if in a snapshot’,52 ‘She fed snapshots/Of you’,53

‘Over in a flash’,54 ‘In that flash/ You saw your whole life’,55 ‘You werea camera’,56 ‘Everything in negative’,57 ‘Just where the snapshot showsyou’,58 ‘my snapshot for life’,59 ‘Camera stars’,60 ‘the crowd, thecameras’,61 ‘the breath-held camera moments’,62 ‘Your words were lostin the camera’,63 ‘your grandma’s/ Wedding photo hurried to forbidit’.64 In this perspective, even the vocabulary of ‘shots’ and ‘shooting’that occurs at certain crucial points in Birthday Letters65 can, andperhaps should, be read in the photographic sense. But I think we muststill go beyond such overt lexical references and realize what pragmaticmoves and gestures the poems actually perform. With their apostrophes,their dialogic simulation, sometimes dramatic touches and frequentdeictic signals, the entire sequence of Hughes’s eighty-eight poemsconveys a strong sense of a familiar homely scene as if their speaker werelooking at specific pictures and debating what they show. ‘What werethose caryatids bearing?’,66 ‘I look up – as if to meet your voice’,67 ‘Ican feel your bounced and dangling anguish’,68 ‘The panther?’,69 ‘Sothere in Number Eighteen . . . I waited for you’,70 ‘How did you enter?What came next?’,71 ‘There you met it’,72 ‘I see you . . . /In your pinkwool knitted dress’,73 ‘There you are, in all your innocence,/Sittingamong your daffodils’,74 and so on. Moreover, the many geographicalshifts and journeys that the poems register between Cambridge, London,Paris, Spain, New England, the American West, Devon, Yorkshire andagain London create a constant sense of spatial movement which culmi-nates in the central dozen or so poems tracing the adventurous honeymoonof the Hughes couple touring US National Parks – all this suggestsnothing so much as a sequence of photographs once taken as a matter oftouristic interest but now revisited and contemplated for the personalloss they document.

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Birthday Letters therefore, I feel justified to claim, is patterned on aphoto album, whether real or imaginary. Its discontinuous yet orderedseries of brief biographical narratives superimposed on autobiographicalmemories, often phrased in photographic language, follows from the struc-ture ritually produced by home photography and conventionally given toits products as a visual family archive.

Cameras go with family life. [. . .] Through photographs, each familyconstructs a portrait-chronicle of itself – a portable kit of images thatbears witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activitiesare photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cher-ished. Photography becomes a rite of family life [. . .]. Thoseghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dis-persed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally aboutthe extended family – and, often, all that remains of it.75

What Susan Sontag so describes sounds plausible enough, yet it gains strik-ing and uncanny resonances in the present context where, literally, all thatis left of this particular family’s life of the 1950s and early 1960s is a set ofphotographs – cherished pictures here remaining and remembered in theverbalized version of Hughes’s final book (dedicated, by the way, to Friedaand Nicholas Hughes, the two children from his first marriage, as if gestur-ing towards their remaining connectedness). Since the invention of theKodak, Hirsch argues,76 ‘photography’s social functions are integrallytied to the ideology of the modern family’, so that the family photo‘both displays the cohesion of the family and is an instrument of itstogetherness’. But what if such a family photo can only display loss?What happens to the claims of social cohesion when the family framecontains traumatic absence? How might it be reframed in language?

In 1979 Hughes published a volume entitled Remains of Elmet, asequence of sixty-two poems responding to a series of photographs byFay Godwin. Her stunning black-and-white pictures capture bleakimpressions of the Calder Valley where Hughes was born and bred; theirpower ‘moved’ him, as he said,77 ‘to write the accompanying poems’and so in his linguistic medium provide some shelter, or perhaps an urn,to keep and salvage the few remaining images of this dying Yorkshire land-scape, in the aftermath of world war and industrial decline on the brink ofcultural disappearance.

Death-struggle of the glacierEnlarged the long gullet of CalderDown which its corpse vanished.[. . .]

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Now, coil behind coil,A wind-parched ache,An absence, famished and staring,Admits tourists

To pick among crumbling, loose molarsAnd empty sockets.78

As here in the title poem, the mood throughout is sombre, dirgelike, deeplymelancholic; even the outside figures of the ‘tourists’ are evoked in clearnegation of their ritual role: instead of taking pictures of the place theypick its ‘sockets’ – the photographic chamber of this eye (to recallPlath’s phrase) is violated, blinded, ‘empty’. Citing the name of the lastBritish kingdom to fall to the Angles long ago, Elmet seeks to place ‘thepresent plight of the Calder Valley’, as Patricia Boyle Haberstrohwrites,79 ‘in a historical perspective where the modern collapse recapitu-lates the disaster which occurred as the marauding Angles destroyed thelast vestige of Celtic culture’.

To look at Remains of Elmet in this context serves to make a doublepoint. First, the project and poetic process undertaken in Hughes’searlier volume give us a strong model for what I think takes place in Birth-day Letters, published nineteen years later so as to stage an elegiac perform-ance and, in the medium of poetic imagery, rehearse gestures to address anabsence by proxy of the photographic image, trying to recapitulate an olddisaster. Though Godwin’s photographs are all unpeopled (with just twoexceptions), Hughes’s poems struggle to accommodate human traces andin one case even identifiably commemorate his late wife: the one-but-lastphoto-poem in this volume, ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’,80 seeks out theplace where Sylvia lies buried and recites her name among the bede-rollof the dead. Here we anticipate the memorial rites performed in BirthdayLetters – even this title suggests an annual practice of commemoration, ayear’s mind for the addressee – with the crucial difference, however,that the later volume does not contain the actual pictures. While itopenly resists the visual power of photographic portraits, it secretlyretakes it. Second, Remains of Elmet offers ample evidence of the specialquality of photographic power which Sontag identifies as pathos: ‘Pho-tography is an elegiac art, a twilight art’, she notes.81 ‘To take a photographis to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability,mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photo-graphs testify to time’s relentless melt’.

With this account we might reconsider the points raised at the outset,especially the question how to understand the cultural functions ofHughes’s engagement with photography, more often mentioned than

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interpreted. For it is precisely this same quality, the elegiac pathos pro-duced by looking at the frozen moment of a photographic portrait, thathe captured in an early, well-known ekphrastic poem ‘Six Young Men’,written during his relationship with Plath and published in his debutvolume The Hawk in the Rain. It opens with the observation that ‘The cel-luloid of a photograph holds them well,–/Six young men, familiar to theirfriends’: this emphatic phrase and praise of visual preservation only antici-pate the fact of imminent death stated at the end of the first stanza: ‘Sixmonths after this picture they were all dead’.82 Viewing, or re-viewing,the familiar face in photographs is thus dramatized as an uncannymoment of return, a haunting, a confrontation with a past which mustappear so ghostly even as it so lively re-appears and whose effect is so unset-tling because it confronts the beholder, too, with his own death. ‘All photo-graphs’, writes Sontag,83 ‘are memento mori’.

This doubleness of mortal visuality in photographic images was alreadyexplored by Benjamin when he, in his 1931 essay, noted the picture ofDauthenday and his young wife who, after the birth of their children,committed suicide and was found dead by her husband.84 Benjamin’squestion how we might trace this fatal future moment in the here and nowof the photograph, i.e. how our retrospective vision captures the imminenceof death as immanent in the picture, leads to Barthes’s later argument that thephotograph ‘presents an anterior future’ and that ‘it does so withoutmediator’,85 thus not recapturing but defeating time. Yet such temporaldynamics and double views of life and death just reiterate the centralquestions we need to pursue: how, exactly, can we account for the image ofmortality that photography presents? What does it mean to speak of photo-graphs as elegiac? And in what ways might their effects be verbalized inHughes’s letter acts of mourning? To address these issues I briefly return toLa chambre claire and read three photographic Birthday Letters in this light.

IV

The winter garden picture of Barthes’s mother instances the essence of pho-tography, not because it recalls or restores a moment from the past butbecause it attests this moment and declares what we now see to haveonce been the case.86 In a photograph the presence of something orsomeone is never metaphorical,87 Barthes insists, it is a trace of the real.And so while verifying and authenticating the existence that it shows at aspecific instant which has passed, the photographic image immediatelyrenders it a corpse because that point in time is gone and cannot beregained. Thus we behold the living image of something dead, stilledand immobilized in a frozen pose. For this reason every photograph,

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Barthes says,88 also questions me as the beholder, reminds me of my ownmortality and asks why do I live here and now – which is the reason why hespeaks of ‘la melancolie meme de la Photographie’.89

Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.

That blue suit,A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.90

The ending of one of the most melancholic poems in Birthday Letters, theselines from ‘The Blue Flannel Suit’, pondering Plath on a college picture,enact in overpowering clarity what Barthes describes as the uncanny cross-ing between life and death, the ‘confusion perverse’91 of the living and realwhich photography effects. In these lines the speaker falters in his self-posi-tioning between now and then, his vision wavers between the moment ofseeing and the moment seen, as the picture confronts him with a view ofpermanence that slides into mortality. His verbal meanings even seem tofail him (‘Unable to fathom what stilled you’), as if to mark a limit ofwhat language can perform, since it cannot rescue the subject from thedeath which photography always announces. Yet another melancholicpower here arises from the way in which the stillness of the photographedbody affects his own body, too: the spectator admits that he is himself‘stilled’, frozen in the pose of looking, ‘permanently now’ remembering,mourning, perhaps himself dying. With the full spectrum of meanings pro-vided by the key term still that is three times repeated here – ‘not moving’,‘quiet’, ‘silent’, ‘up to now and at this moment’ or ‘isolated image from amoving sequence’ – we can truly call this poetic moment the performanceof a photographic still-life in the medium of language.

In this view we might also understand why Barthes insists92 on thetraumatic impact of photography. It results from what he sees as the literalnessof the image we encounter, unlike painted images principally uncoded, not asign but traces of a referent. Throughout La chambre claire, indeed throughouthis career in semiotics,93 Barthes remains adamant on this point. Referen-tiality in photographs should not be interpreted in the model of linguisticsignification, because the camera fixes a strictly analogical image. ‘It comesfrom the chemical process by which light rays from an object are recorded’94

and so attests to its existence only, never to its connotation, status, value orsignificance. For him, photography is indifferent to meaning and mediation

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as it does not invent nor lie (although it can, of course, be used for all sorts oflies, fictions and simulations).95 This insistence on ‘the photograph as aphysical, material emanation of a past reality’,96 should not be confusedwith a version of what Scott calls the ‘photographic trap’97 assuming thatthe picture were reality duplicated. To be sure, a theory of photographs asmetonyms or relics of their worldly referent belongs to an ‘image-makingor perhaps more accurately an image-consuming regime that is all butdefunct’, as Fried reminds us,98 the spread of digitalization soon transforming‘the ontology of the photograph’. But in the context of Barthes’s and, I wouldargue, Hughes’s engagement with photographic portraits as media ofmourning their ontological status this side of the symbolic is the reason fortheir haunting quality: they present emanations of the dead. Looking at aphotograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Barthes is struck to look intothe eyes that saw the emperor.99 In this way, let us look at Hughes’s poem‘Freedom of Speech’, among the final texts of Birthday Letters:

At your sixtieth birthday, in the cake’s glow,Ariel sits on your knuckle.You feed it grapes, a black one, then a green one,From between your lips pursed like a kiss.Why are you so solemn? Everybody laughs

As if grateful, the whole reunion –Old friends and new friends,Some famous authors, your court of brilliant minds,And publishers and doctors and professors,Their eyes creased in delighted laughter – even

The late poppies laugh, one loses a petal.The candles tremble their tipsTrying to contain their joy. And your MummyIs laughing in her nursing home. Your childrenAre laughing from opposite sides of the globe. Your Daddy

Laughs deep in his coffin. And the stars,Surely the stars, too, shake with laughter.And Ariel –What about Ariel?Ariel is happy to be here.

Only you and I do not smile.100

The poem is here quoted in full to show that it does not contain a single,identifiable photographic term or phrase but that its entire character –what might be called the physiognomy of its gestures, speech acts, visual

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moves and verbal motions – gives us the clear impression of looking at aphotograph of family and friends which is described and discussed. But aswe visualize this happy birthday gathering we begin to note its strange urgeto expand and include ever more people, even absent ones and dead,among the party guests. At which point we must realize that we are herelooking at a picture that was never taken – that could never have beentaken – because its principle subject did not live to see her sixtieth birthdaycelebrated here; she only imagined it in writing one of her Ariel poemscalled ‘A Birthday Present’, which contains the chilling line: ‘After all Iam alive only by accident’.101 In the framework of Hughes’s poeticphoto album this birthday letter thus addresses a reunion of spectres, awholly imaginary image and so perhaps a retrospectively desired one forthe lost presence it could have now presented. Instead of emanations ofa real personal referent we are faced only with the fictions of language –but then the poem is entitled ‘Freedom of Speech’ and so reads like an illus-tration of Barthes’s claim102 that language, unlike photography, cannotand need not bear witness to what it represents because its essence isinvention.

As a third and final example, let us consider the poem ‘Black Coat’, inwhich the photographic focus is reversed and the speaking persona imagi-nes himself inadvertently posing in a picture taken by his addressee. At thesame time, the text explores the effects of double reference as the kind offiguration that the photographic image of the real can produce, thedouble exposure of camera work. The poem begins, simple enough, witha personal memory –

I remember going out there,The tide far out, the North Shore ice-windCutting me back103

– but as Plath readers may notice, this recollection in fact follows an inter-textual trace from her first published collection, the poem ‘Man in Black’where she envisages the same coastal scene104 and finally focuses on whatshe calls ‘your dead/ Black coat’. So when Hughes’s later text speaks ofhis ‘returning footprints’ he can be seen to retrace, literally, what printshe once left in her writing as he now reverses the perspective and returnsher words. But the real reversal in ‘Black Coat’ takes place in the thirdstanza where the photographer discovers that he has secretly himselfbeen captured in her gaze, ‘shot’, as it were, from afar:

So I had no idea I had steppedInto the telescopic sightsOf the paparazzo sniper

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Nested in your brown iris.Perhaps you had no idea either,So far off, half a mile maybe,Looking towards me. Watching mePin the sea’s edge down.No ideaHow that double image,Your eye’s inbuilt double exposureWhich was the projectionOf your two-way heart’s diplopic error,The body of the ghost and me the blurred see-throughCame into single focus,Sharp-edged, stark as a target,Set up like a decoyAgainst that freezing seaFrom which your dead father had just crawled.

I did not feelHow, as your lenses tightened,He slid into me.105

This powerful sea drama or see drama – both senses of the homophone areconstantly played out – stages the main interpretative key in BirthdayLetters by which the mourner thinks he has unlocked the heart forwhom he mourns, his suicidal wife whose haunting by the spectre of herfather he must here identify and, at the same time, embody. Lookingback at the way he says she looked at him he now sees that she saw inhim a double: Daddy’s double – who never lost his fatal grip on herand finally drove her to self-destruction. In the embattled Hughes–Plathrelationship, this is the so-called ‘Daddy-plot’, the narrative of a fatalfamily romance which may or may not have originated, as some say,106

in Plath’s own writing but which certainly emerges as a central story toldin Birthday Letters. Let me be very clear about my stance: I offer no histori-cal or psychological comment and have nothing to say for the biographicalrecord. I would only like to emphasize that this story of death and dou-bling, as it is recalled with ‘Black Coat’, crucially turns on the apparatusof the camera and works by a photographic technique: the ‘doubleexposure’ capturing both Teddy and Daddy as one ghostly figure inSylvia’s family album. Whereas Aristotle in his theory of metaphor onceclaimed that it was the most distinguished power of the poet to seehidden similarities, the photographic chamber of Plath’s eye is here diag-nosed as marked, or marred, by producing ‘that double image’, i.e. thatmonstrous double-beast which turns out no less terrorizing and even

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more resilient than the mythic Minotaur. What are we to make of heralleged ‘diplopic error’?

What here emerges I think is a paradigmatic case of visual and textualcondensation. As Hughes’s poem lays itself over the contours of Plath’searlier poem it recovers and simultaneously covers images she once con-structed. Although, to some degree, it does accord with her compositeversion (her poem ends: ‘All of it, together’), it also records how her rep-resentations are reviewed with the sceptical eye of whom she thus rep-resented or, as he may feel, misrepresented in her writing. All this istroped in camera language and fixed in the photographic term of‘double exposure’. What she is thus said to have done is ‘to adopt the pro-cedure by means of which Galton produced family portraits: namely byprojecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain featurescommon to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in withone another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture’.107

This last sentence is quoted from The Interpretation of Dreams, chaptersix, where Freud explains the condensation of dream-work in terms ofso-called composite photographs. To the analyst of the unconscious,the technology of the camera offers key explanatory models to interpretthe peculiar images produced by hidden anxieties or desires. But to theelegist and mourner of a suicidal wife, such double portraits must lookthreatening and uncanny, which is why he reworks them in his BirthdayLetters as screen memories for his own poetic language. In fact, inanother context Freud admits108 that any real confrontation with such acomposite face feels like a return of the dead – especially when, as in hiscase (and as perhaps in Hughes’s case, too), he suspects himself to havebeen guilty of this person’s early death.

V

Photographs, I mentioned at the outset, have long been associated withfunctions of family life, memory and mourning. What, then, do thepeculiar imagetexts in Hughes’s collection tell us about this cultural con-nection? As we have seen, the pictures evoked or imagined in BirthdayLetters are very different in their status: some, like the image of OttoPlath, are photographs long circulating in the public domain – journals,biographies or newspapers – and easily identifiable for readers; othersseem to be more of a private, familial character, as if from archives notwidely accessible, whether real or imaginary; still others, like Sylvia’s sixti-eth birthday picture, are entirely and necessarily constructed by means oflanguage. Thus, the peculiar photo-album that emerges from the sequenceis itself a composite work, combining and confronting not just visual and

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verbal acts but also acts of collection and recollection with crucial acts ofreinvention. This is likely to have bearings on our reading of Hughes’simagetexts.

According to James Heffernan,109 the verbal–visual relation ofekphrasis can be defined as ‘the verbal representation of a visual represen-tation’. The point lies in the act of doubling, hence contesting, the differentpowers of representation in the two different media: the verbal act takes aterrain previously taken by the visual act; words deliver into time and nar-rative whatever the visual, i.e. spatial work of art had to contain in its one‘pregnant’ moment. Ekphrastic texts derive their energy and tension fromthis kind of struggle they always stage between these rival modes in thesemiosis of representation. Such a struggle, however, cannot be quite thesame in photographic poems where the visual image which they verbalizedoes not really function as a symbolizing, figurative text. If ‘photographicmeaning bypasses or postpones signification’, in the words of Scott,110 ‘toassert its purely evidential or idexical value’ so that, in Barthes’s words, thepoint of photography lies in preserving emanations of a referent, thus pre-senting a trace of the real instead of representing it – then any ekphrasticengagement with photographs moves on very different grounds.

There is at least one poem in Birthday Letters that launches a conven-tional ekphrasis as it provides a verbal representation of a visual represen-tation but, at the same time, sceptically explores the conventions on whichekphrasis proceeds. ‘The Earthenware Head’111 offers some self-consciousreflections occasioned by a clay model of Plath’s head, criticizing its ‘like-ness that just failed’ while modelling itself on an ekphrastic poem by Plathabout this same portrait sculpture (‘The Lady and the EarthenwareHead’112), whose writing it records. Among these complex layers of rep-resentation and counter-representation Hughes’s text explicitly addressesthe poetic tradition of ekphrasis, citing John Keats’s ‘cold pastoral’ as theritual example:

PerhapsIt is still there, representing youTo the sunrise, and happyIn its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightlyAs if my touch had only just left it.Or did boys find it – and shatter it?113

The conjectures concern the questionable permanence of visual artworkswhich, since the Horatian topos, are regularly opposed to the longevityof poems made of words and so freed from all perishable material. Butin the context of Birthday Letters the poet’s ‘touch’ mainly concerns portraitphotographs, not portrait sculptures, i.e. he verbalizes or imagines visual

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works in which the pregnant moment certainly ‘is still there’ and can still‘shatter’ the beholder. Occasioned and patterned by a photographicarchive, then, this poet has built his final lasting monument in letters; ascurator, commentator, spectator and speaker of this poetic photo galleryhe constructs he ponders certain moments of a lost familial relationshipand so delivers narratives he says they must contain.

This is not to say that the dynamics of a power struggle for control arenot equally relevant in the present context, but they have shifted to anotherlevel. Historically, the medium of photography in general developed withthe practices of criminal inquiry or military operation114 and FrancisGalton’s technique of double exposure, in particular, was used by thepolice.115 But in contemplating and describing photographs, Hughes’spoems appropriate such practices for his elegiac purpose, trying to construea public language to represent and, in this way, cover a still painful loss.The ceremonial, sometimes incantatory gestures of classic elegy are hereperformed while using photographic images because these gestures offercultural ways to face, and possibly efface, the remains of the real.Elegies, when successful, are linguistic performatives which change theway things are. But the consolations they bring about can only work, asPeter Sacks explains,116 when the mourner manages to entrust his griefto the mediating fabrics of culture, i.e. language or other symbolicsystems and their figures, because only symbolization can trope and treas-ure, cool and keep, our experience of pain: this is what is known as the workof mourning. It requires an act of submission as much as an act of sublima-tion and both are performed with Hughes’s photographic poems. He usesphotographs in order to translate their traumatic image of the dead, asBarthes put it, into the forms and images of language and so tries tosupply what photographs cannot quite give: the verbal and symbolic figura-tions which turn grief into mourning, mourning into memory andmemory into a lasting cultural form – a form that may also enableforgetting.

Nancy Shawcross opens her study of Barthes on photography,117 witha list of terms by which photography ‘in the past 155 years’ has routinelybeen associated in cultural discourse, in each case juxtaposing it to a con-trasting notion: metonym as opposed to metaphor, reality as opposed toart, denotation and transliteration as opposed to connotation and trans-formation, and so on. For historians of visual culture, such dichotomiesinvite reflection about the social meanings ascribed at a particular timeto photographs or to their counterpoints, especially painting. In an influ-ential account about the cultural return of pictures, for instance, GottfriedBoehm118 has argued on the basis of these contrasts to emphasize the poiesisof paintings, i.e. their productive, inventive, figurative aspects – as opposedto mimetic power – that make them rich and interesting. To him,

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photographic images appear to be less challenging because they are oftenperceived in purely referential terms without attention to the intricaciesof the mimetic function which makes them work.119 Hirsch wouldconcur, I think, but say that photography performs its complex culturalwork precisely because it ‘holds a unique relation to the real’120 and,with the invention of the affordable camera for everyone, has even‘entered the domain of the ordinary and the domestic’.121 In an evenbroader view, Green-Lewis has reconstructed the nineteenth-century riseof realism that historically gave the camera its authority: ‘Against thevagaries of memory, therefore, the photograph was pitted as historicalfact: reliable, objective, true’122 – so much so, we may add, that paintinghenceforth has been less and less regarded in terms of such reliability andmore for its productive possibilities and figurative vagaries. Against thisbackground, my reading of Birthday Letters has set out to suggest howHughes’s poems rework this relation. In their ekphrastic engagementswith photography they verbalize the metonymic presence of the picture’sreferent but, with its encoding into language, they constantly and necess-arily foreground the exigencies of mediation and thus powerfullyperform the process of figuration. A ‘strong’ picture, Boehm says,123

lives by a double truth: it shows or simulates certain things and simul-taneously shows us the criteria and premises of this experience. Thisproductive tension between transparency and opacity in paintings,between factum and fictum, is what he calls the ‘iconic contrast’ bywhich strong pictures work—strong picture poems, too, as I would liketo add. It seems to me that Birthday Letters offers a strong example forjust this kind of cultural productivity: because the poems here all live bythe tension between the factum of photography and the fictum of poeticlanguage, as their ekphrasis turns the stilled presence of certain picturesinto dynamic figures.

As argued earlier, the photographic medium long continues to evadethe symbolic grasp of language. And yet, to make of photographs a textualpractice, as we see in Hughes’s last book of poems, can still be read as anattempt to inscribe them with new meanings, claiming what he calls‘freedom of speech’ against their traumatic force. Like La chambre claire,Barthes’s ‘swan song for an artifact on the brink of fundamentalchange’,124 this reading rests on an understanding of photography priorto its change in digital technology. The uses of photography we noted inHughes’s poems thus belong to a cultural period, now past: it might becalled the heroic age of photography which began, as Barthes notes,125

around the same time that traditional rites of death and burial werelosing their acceptance in Western society. Besides, it does not seem tobe a coincidence that this same cultural period was also the heroic age ofpsychoanalysis because its founding notions – such as ‘condensation’ or

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indeed the reality of the unconscious – were regularly explained and intro-duced by Freud in photographic terms.126 And yet, the hidden layers heprobed in analysis and the double exposures so brought to light werealways the result of talking cures and worked entirely by verbal means,because the unconscious repository of images is structured like a language.

Accordingly, my double vision in this paper has also been whollytextual, a palimpsest of various writer’s texts on images. This, finally,holds true even for my title. ‘Double exposure’ is not only the photo-graphic term I quoted from Hughes’s poem, it also happens to be theworking title for the last unfinished novel Sylvia Plath was writing at thetime of her death.127 The manuscript has been reported missing. Still, itseems to me that Birthday Letters may present us with a double image ofwhat has been lost.

LMU Munich

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to quote ‘Freedom ofSpeech’ and further excerpts from Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters. I wouldalso like to acknowledge with gratitude the helpful comments from twoanonymous reviewers for Textual Practice on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1997]), p. xxi.

2 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: GallimardSeuil, Cahiers du Cinema, 1980), p. 99.

3 Barthes 1980, p. 100.4 Hirsch 2002, p. 6.5 Barthes 1980, p. 106.6 Jay Prosser, ‘Buddha Barthes: What Barthes Saw in Photography (that he

didn’t see in Literature)’, Literature and Theology, 18:2 (2004), pp. 211–222.7 Barthes 1980, p. 109.8 Roland Barthes, ‘Uber Photographie. Interview mit Angelo Schwarz (1977)

und Guy Mandery (1979)’, Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des foto-graphischen Zeitalters, ed. Herta Wolf. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002),pp. 82–88. Transl. Dieter Hornig.

9 Cf. Nancy N. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tra-dition in Perspective (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997),pp. 86–106.

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10 Hirsch 2002, p. 2.11 Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion

Boks, 1999), p. 25.12 Michael Fried, ‘Barthes’s Punctum’, Critical Inquiry, 31:2 (2005),

pp. 539–574, here p. 558.13 Cf. Shawcross 1997, p. 119.14 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998), p. 15.15 Tim Dant and Graeme Gilloch, ‘Pictures of the Past: Benjamin and Barthes

on Photography and History’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5:1(2002), pp. 5–23, here p. 6.

16 Jennifer Green-Lewis, ‘Not Fading Away: Photography in the Age of Obliv-ion’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 22:4 (2001), pp. 559–574, here p. 271.

17 Cf. Hirsch 2002, p. 3.18 Quoted in: Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift. Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story

of Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 2000), p. 22.19 Barthes 1980, p. 28.20 Rand Brand, ‘Ted Hughes in and out of Time: Remains of Elmet and Moor-

town Elegies’, World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the ‘Jubi-lation of Poets’, ed. Leonard M. Trawick (Kent: Kent State University Press,1990), pp. 37–43, here p. 43.

21 Alvarez quoted in: Lynda K. Bundtzen, ‘Mourning Eurydice: Ted Hughes asOrpheus in Birthday Letters’, Journal of Modern Literature, 23 (2000),pp. 455–469, here p. 457.

22 Hughes 1998, p.9.23 Leslie Cahoon, ‘Haunted Husbands: Orpheus’s Song (Ovid, Metamorphoses

10–11) in the Light of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Defining Genre inLatin Literature: Essays Presented to William S. Anderson on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, eds. William W. Batstone and Garth Tissol (New York etc.:Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 239–268, here p. 242.

24 Sarah Churchwell, ‘Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication andTed Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Contemporary Literature, 42:1 (2001),pp. 102–148, here p. 122.

25 Scott 1999, p. 9.26 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979 [1977]), p. 6.27 Hughes 1998, p. 3.28 Ibid.29 Churchwell 2001, p. 122.30 Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Huges, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday

Letters (London: Faber, 2000).31 Cf. Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes. The Life of a Poet (London: Weidenfeld &

Nicholson, 2001), p. 235.32 Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber, 1997).33 Anne Whitehead, ‘Refiguring Orpheus: the possession of the past in Ted

Hughes’ Birthday Letters’, Textual Practice, 13:2 (1999), pp. 227–241.34 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (London: Faber 1981).35 Plath 1981, p. 223.

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36 Hughes 1998, p. 193.37 Bundtzen 2000, p. 462.38 Bundtzen 2000, p. 459.39 Hirsch 2002, p. 34.40 Barthes 1980, p. 80.41 Barthes 1980, p. 114.42 Hughes 1998, p. 120.43 Barthes 1980, p. 83.44 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

(New York:Vintage, 1995 [1993]).45 Malcolm 1995, p. 16.46 Malcolm 1995, p. 54.47 Malcolm 1995, p. 123.48 Malcolm 1995, p. 71.49 W.J.T. Mitchell. Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),

p. 110.50 Scott 1999, p. 327.51 Malcolm 1995, p. 49.52 Hughes 1998, p. 4.53 Hughes 1998, p. 7.54 Hughes 1998, p. 11.55 Hughes 1998, p. 16.56 Hughes 1998, p. 33.57 Hughes 1998, p. 41.58 Hughes 1998, p. 60.59 Hughes 1998, p. 62.60 Hughes 1998, p. 90.61 Hughes 1998, p. 98.62 Hughes 1998, p. 136.63 Hughes 1998, p. 143.64 Hughes 1998, p. 170.65 Hughes 1998, p. 16.66 Hughes 1998, p. 4.67 Hughes 1998, p. 9.68 Hughes 1998, p. 10.69 Hughes 1998, p. 18.70 Hughes 1998, p. 20.71 Hughes 1998, p. 22.72 Hughes 1998, p. 26.73 Hughes 1998, p. 35.74 Hughes 1998, p. 143.75 Sontag 1979, pp. 8–9.76 Hirsch 2002, p. 7.77 Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet. A Pennine Sequence. Poems by Ted Hughes,

Photographs by Fay Godwin (London: Faber, 1979), p. 8.78 Hughes 1979, p. 53.

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79 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, ‘Historical Landscapes in Ted Hughes’s Remainsof Elmet’, Clio, 14:2 (1985), pp. 137–154, here p. 137.

80 Hughes 1979, p. 122.81 Sontag 1979, p. 15.82 Ted Hughes, Selected Poems, 1957–1981 (London: Faber, 1982), p. 31.83 Sontag 1979, p. 15.84 Walter Benjamin, ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie [1931]’, Angelus

Novus. Ausgewahlte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988),pp. 229–247, here p. 232.

85 Shawcross 1997, p. 111.86 Barthes 1980, p. 129.87 Barthes 1980, p. 123.88 Barthes 1980, p. 131.89 Barthes 1980, p. 124.90 Hughes 1998, p. 68.91 Barthes 1980, p. 123.92 Barthes 2002, p. 85.93 Cf. Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991),

p. 197.94 Moriarty 1991, p. 205.95 Barthes 1980, p. 135.96 Hirsch 2002, p. 6.97 Scott 1999, p. 9.98 Fried 2005, p. 562.99 Barthes 1980, p. 13.

100 Hughes 1998, p. 192.101 Plath 1981, p. 206.102 Barthes 1980, p. 134.103 Hughes 1998, p. 102.104 Plath 1981, pp. 119–120.105 Plath 1981, pp. 102–103.106 Cf. Churchwell 2001, p. 124.107 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Trans. James Strachey,

Penguin Freud Library 4 (London: Penguin, 1991 [1900]), p. 400.108 Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensens’s Gradiva’, Art and Lit-

erature. Trans. James Strachey. Pelican Freud Library 14 (London:Penguin, 1987 [1907]), pp. 27–118, here p. 95.

109 James A.W. Heffernan, The Museum of Words. The Poetics of Ekphrasis fromHomer to Ashbery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3.

110 Scott 1999, p. 57.111 Hughes 1998, pp. 57–58.112 Plath 1981, pp. 69–10.113 Hughes 1998, p. 58.114 Cf. Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien. Berliner Vorlesungen 1999 (Berlin:

Merve, 2002).

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115 Cf. Ulla Haselstein, Entziffernde Hermeneutik. Zum Begriff der Lekture in derpsychoanalytischen Theorie des Unbewußten (Munchen: Fink, 1991), pp. 29–31.

116 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy. Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats(Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 1–37.

117 Shawcross 1997, pp. ix–x.118 Gottfried Boehm, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Bilder’, Was ist ein Bild?, ed.

Gottfried Boehm (Munchen: Fink, 1994), pp. 11–38, here p. 16.119 Cf. Boehm 1994, p. 35.120 Hirsch 2002, p .4.121 Hirsch 2002, p. 6.122 Green-Lewis 2001, p. 578.123 Boehm 1994, p. 35.124 Fried 2005, p. 563.125 Barthes 1980, p. 144.126 Cf. Sarah Kofman, ‘Freud – Der Fotoapparat’, Paradigma Fotografie. Fotok-

ritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, ed. Herta Wolf, trans. DieterHornig (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 60–66.

127 Churchwell 2001, p. 132.

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